- Title
- 'Now, look at my skin, it is black and it is white together'
- Creator
- Ford, Margot; Purdon, Ailsa
- Relation
- Mixed Race Identities in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands p. 67-83
- Relation
- Routledge Studies in Anthropology
- Relation
- https://www.routledge.com/Mixed-Race-Identities-in-Australia-New-Zealand-and-the-Pacific-Islands/Fozdar-McGavin/p/book/9781138677708
- Publisher
- Routledge
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2017
- Description
- This chapter documents and explores the experiences of being mothers to bi-racial children. Both of us are from white Anglo-Celtic backgrounds, educated and middle class, and yet the experiences of being mothers to our children introduced us to new understandings and ways of interacting with Australian society. Using autoethnography, we show the ways in which we were forced to engage not only with the racialised discourses that underpin key social narratives in Australia, but also the habitus of compulsory social institutions such as schools, in ways we had not experienced previously. As mothers, we learned to listen to our children and their experiences, learning also about the lack of voice that individual children have in defining their own identity and aspirations for their future. For our children, being mixed race was not about the reality of their lives, our families, their personalities and skills, the social and cultural capital that would have normally accrued to our children, but about being defined by existing racialised discourses about people of colour. As educators, we are concerned that teachers are unprepared to deal with the phenomenon of mixed race students and the complex issues of racism that can unfold for them. In our experiences, teachers ignore or make excuses for racist incidents, frequently 'blaming the victim' as an easy option, because they are ill-equipped to deal with the realities of racism. In this chapter we use the theories of Bourdieu to analyse our experiences, particularly his ideas of doxa and habitus. Bourdieu's theorising helps us to articulate ourselves as white mothers located in the spaces and places in which we, and our children, were acting, together with the narratives we were creating. According to Bourdieu, changes in the conditions of living can raise or lower the level of individual and community expectations or aspirations and other possibilities can be imagined and acted upon by individuals and groups. His ideas offer a way of viewing and studying the social and political contexts in which we brought up our children as a field of practice occupied by a set of social agents within a broader global field of power relationships and not only through the lens of race and racism. Within this framework, the actions of the social agents are determined not only through relationships of habitus and field and the exchange and accumulation of various forms of capital, but also through their own levels of consciousness, reflection and understanding of the systems that structure the social fields in which they live. Our stories are stories of how we needed to become aware of the ways in which the social fields in which our children operated structured the resources that would be available to them. It was important to us that our children not internalise and personalise the dissonance that they felt as being 'different' as somehow their fault, but as something systemic. It was equally important that those whose actions impacted upon our children become aware of how these actions are shaped by history and the systems which shape the social fields which we all inhabit. Our aim in writing this chapter is to engage members of our community in on-going dialogue about the differences between discourses of equity and reality, exposing shifting ideas about relationships of power upon marked subjects. The chapter begins by drawing upon the foundational ideas Bourdieu's theorising, including; habitus, doxa, orthodoxy and heterodoxy, and capital, which frames an analysis of several incidences. The vignettes are organised thematically-beginning with a discussion of experiences in public spaces, before moving into experiences in schools. Underpinning the vignettes is the struggle for our children to establish their own racialised identities in the face of assumed orthodoxies and the role we play as white mothers in arguing for that right.
- Subject
- bi-racial; Anglo-Celtic; Australia; identity; Bourdieu
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1400760
- Identifier
- uon:34807
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781138677708
- Language
- eng
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